QWERTY/Dvorak (was //c+ switch settings)

From: Mark Tapley <mtapley_at_swri.edu>
Date: Tue Sep 3 10:37:01 2002

Sellam asked:

>Who the hell uses Dvorak?

Yo.

>A very interesting and unique feature to have
>on a computer (anyone else know of a computer that had a switch that would
>instantly change the keymapping between QWERTY and Dvorak?)

Now this is *cool*!. Why didn't Apple include a Dvorak keymapping with the
early Mac's, if they knew enough to do this in hardware with the //c+? Oh
well, it's in there now, and ElectricDvorak exists for the earlier macs.

I use it, love it, and strongly recommend it to anyone meeting the
following criteria:

can spend about 2 weeks of 30 minutes/day to practice
-AND-
( is not a touch typist -OR- has any problem with RSI)

It does, fairly reliably, generate a 50% speed-up in typing, with fewer
errors. My wife, a qwerty touch-typist who then learned dvorak touch,
reports that it does *not* interfere with qwerty touch-typing - she
switches from one to the other with the only symptom being that she types
about 30 seconds of gibberish before "locking in" on the new layout. I
can't report from personal experience, because I'm a qwerty hunt-n-peck and
dvorak touch. I'm at least 100% faster dvorak.

I do recommend that you learn dvorak touch, because that'll accentuate the
advantages of it, and because that way you don't need to rearrange the
keycaps.

A very useful demo is to have a Dvorak typist type while the "key caps"
panel is open on a Mac. It's *amazing* how the little black dots seem to
almost all flash on the home row...

Available in modern Mac OS (as the dv or dq layouts, dq recommended because
that way ctrl-x (cut), ctrl-c (copy), and ctrl-v (paste) are still
one-handed operations). Available in modern Windows machines, look in the
keyboard control panel. If you want to run it on an old Mac, let me know
and I'll fix you up with ElectricDvorak (for sys 6.0.8 or later, I think)
or the ElectricDvorak layout for more recent systems.

                                                - Mark
Received on Tue Sep 03 2002 - 10:37:01 BST